Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots De seksuele ontwikkeling van jongeren Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Sex trafficking Prostitutie PornografieIncididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.
Laura KIPNIS"Lately I’ve been thinking that future generations will look back on the recent upheavals in sexual culture on American campuses and see officially sanctioned hysteria. They’ll wonder how supposedly rational people could have succumbed so easily to collective paranoia, just as we look back on previous such outbreaks (Salem, McCarthyism, the Satanic ritual abuse preschool trials of the 1980s) with condescension and bemusement. They’ll wonder how the federal government got into the moral panic business, tossing constitutional rights out the window in an ill-conceived effort to protect women students from a rapidly growing catalogue of sexual bogeymen. They’ll wonder why anyone would have described any of this as feminism when it’s so blatantly paternalistic, or as “political correctness” when sexual paranoia doesn’t have any predictable political valence. (Neither does sexual hypocrisy.) Restoring the most fettered versions of traditional femininity through the back door is backlash, not progress." [mijn nadruk] (3)
Er werd door studenten geprotesteerd tegen een artikel over gedragscodes tussen docenten en studenten dat Kipnis had geschreven, vanuit onderbuikgevoelens, niet vanuit wat het artikel naar voren bracht.
"One student said she’d had a “very visceral reaction” to it; another called it “terrifying.” I’d argued that the new codes infantilized students and ramped up the climate of accusation, while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives, and here were students demanding to be protected by university higher-ups from the affront of someone’s ideas — which seemed to prove my point."(6)
"Marching against a published article wasn’t a good optic — it smacked of book burning, something Americans generally oppose, while conveniently illustrating my observation in the essay that students’ assertions of vulnerability have been getting awfully aggressive in the past few years." [mijn nadruk] (7)
Desondanks kreeg ze tot haar verbazing een onderzoek aan haar broek van een universitaire commissie - een Title IX-proces over gender discriminatie.
"Also, paranoia is a formula for intellectual rigidity, and its inroads on campus are so effectively dumbing down the place that the traditional ideal of the university — as a refuge for complexity, a setting for the free exchange of ideas — is getting buried under an avalanche of platitudes and fear." [mijn nadruk] (9)
[Geen goede ontwikkelingen, nee.]
Ze schreef over dat proces een tweede artikel.
"It turns out that rampant accusation is the new norm on today’s campus; the place is a secret cornucopia of accusation, especially when it comes to sex. Including merely speaking about sex. My in-box became a clearinghouse for depressing and infuriating tales of overblown charges, capricious verdicts, and frightening bureaucratic excess. I was introduced to an astonishing netherworld of accused professors and students, rigged investigations, closed-door hearings, and Title IX officers run amok. This was a world I’d previously known nothing about, because no one on campus knows anything about it, or no one who hasn’t yet been brought up on charges for something. And those in the know are too terrified to speak out because the complaints typically arrive with demands for confidentiality and threats that speaking about the complaints will result in potential job loss or expulsion." [mijn nadruk] (11)
"Sexual assault is a reality on campus, though not exactly a new one. But despite all the recent attention and the endless flurry of statistics, it’s still an incredibly underexamined reality, permeated by speech taboos and barbed-wire fences meant to deter intellectual intruders. We’re never going to decrease sexual assault on campus — a goal I assume everyone shares — if we can’t have open conversations about it. Having control over your body is, especially for women, a learned skill; it requires education. It also requires a lot more honesty about the complicated sexual realities hiding behind the slogans than is currently permissible. My question becomes: what contradictions are we not supposed to notice, hiding in plain sight behind those large No Trespassing signs?" [mijn nadruk] (13)
"About those realities: the underlying gender dynamic is blind spot number two — the dynamic between men and women, I mean. Men and women. What I’m saying is that policies and codes that bolster traditional femininity — which has always favored stories about female endangerment over stories about female agency — are the last thing in the world that’s going to reduce sexual assault, which is the argument at the heart of this book." [mijn nadruk] (14)
"... I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us that assault is around every corner ..." [mijn nadruk] (20)
"Even today’s cardinal danger, sex with teachers, which many of us dabbled in without too many horrible consequences, was educational. A high percentage of the women I know have a teacher or two in their past; most, as far as I can tell, regard these experiences fondly. Or, even when feelings are mixed, it wasn’t some sort of awful trauma. When I look back on it now, I wonder who I’d have become without all the bad sex, the flawed teachers, and the liberty to make mistakes. I got to take risks, which was a training ground for later creative and intellectual risks, precisely because we didn’t think of sex as a harm." [mijn nadruk] (20)
[Ze heeft het hier eerder ook negatief over moraliseren. Jammer genoeg definieert ze de term niet. Hier blijkt dat ze weer zo iemand is die er vanuit gaat dat er geen waarheid is, m.a.w.: weer een postmodern standpunt. Terwijl ze toch fundamentele kritiek levert op die 'seks is gevaar'-benadering. Is dat dan niet moraliseren? Is dat niet iets voor waar houden?]
"Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that my generation’s story about pleasure was any truer than this one’s story about danger."(21)
"No doubt the slogans about pleasure and liberation were our little lies about sex — the realities were obviously a lot thornier, especially for women. But today’s hazard story, too, comes with its own evasions, namely the blind spot about women’s agency. In a sexual culture that emphasizes female violation, endangerment, and perpetual vulnerability (“rape culture”), men’s power is taken as a given instead of interrogated: men need to be policed, women need to be protected." [mijn nadruk] (22)
"If this is what feminism on campus has come to, then seriously, let’s just cash it in and start over, because this feminism is broken. It has exactly nothing to do with gender equity or emancipating women — a cynic might say it actually has more to do with extending the reach of campus bureaucracy into everyone’s lives." [mijn nadruk] (26)
"Carceral feminism — the term was invented by Barnard sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein — is pretty much the guiding spirit in campus policy, and it’s a profoundly conservative, law-and-order spirit, with resources diverted away from education and toward punishment. Even if no one’s going around wearing little flag lapel pins, the idea that this is some kind of left-wing plot strikes me as short on . . . intelligence." [mijn nadruk] (28)
"How is it that the most reactionary versions of feminism are the ones enjoying the greatest success on campuses? For one thing, those are the versions reaping the institutional support, not least in Washington." [mijn nadruk] (30)
"o all this was in the back of my mind when the Chronicle asked me to write an essay on campus sexual politics. Mulling it over, I recalled the notice that had arrived by email a year or so before (out of the blue, it seemed), banning all dating, romantic, or sexual relations between undergraduates and faculty members, consensual or not.(...) There were already harassment codes on the books prohibiting nonconsensual relations or contact, so why prohibit consensual activity? It struck me as antifeminist, yet another puncture to female autonomy ... (...) It all seemed massively hypocritical, given the legions of professors who’ve dated a student or two in their day. More than a few female professors, too; in fact, I’m one of them. Don’t ask for details — it’s one of those things it now behooves one to be reticent about, lest you be branded a sex fiend." [mijn nadruk] (31)
"Of course a large reason tuition costs are climbing is the growth of officialdom. The ratio of administrators to students has nearly doubled since 1975, political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg reports in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, while the ratio of faculty to students has stayed constant. These administrative hires often have no academic background, yet they’re the ones making policies and setting the tenor of the place. They’re also typically paid a lot more than faculty."(37)
"Sure, there have always been ideologues on campuses, but the old ideologues were at least expected to argue the validity of their ideas. The new brand are ideologues of feelings, and feelings can’t be argued. Despite being a certified left-wing feminist, I just don’t believe that experience or identity credentialize you intellectually. In fact, it’s usually the opposite: overvaluing subjectivity has a way of stunting intellectual growth, especially when it comes to ideas that threaten your self-coherence, which the best ideas often do. The latest demands for intellectual conformity may come in progressive packaging, but feminists and leftists should be flinging these pieties away like lumps of dung, not kowtowing to the virtue parade." [mijn nadruk] (41)
" ... why is intergenerational sex such a great taboo at this moment, when not so long ago it was no big thing? (If you want evidence, look at all those professor-student marriages.) What’s shifted?" [mijn nadruk] (44)
"By the way, complaints can increasingly be made anonymously — which is to say that witch hunt conditions are now an institutionalized feature of campus life."(46)
"From what I’ve learned in the last year and a half, these sorts of arbitrary and often outlandish tribunals are being conducted at colleges and universities all over the country, with accused faculty and students being stripped of their rights and, in many instances, simply hung out to dry to give the appearance that higher ed is mobilized against sexual assault." [mijn nadruk] (50)
[Ik denk dat deze inleiding de hele problematiek aardig op een rij zet. Ik mis het benadrukken van die vreselijke legalistische cultuur in de VS waarin iedereen bang is voor rechtszaken en waar iedereen ze aanspant om niks. Waarschijnlijk kan ik nu verder sneller door het boek heen. ]
[Hier wel meer over al die rechtszaken. Vooral voor de rijken want: ]
"But it takes deep pockets for a student to sue: a minimum of a hundred thousand dollars, and up to a million to bring a case before a jury, one attorney told me."(59)
"The question becomes whether, as with off-campus crime, sexual assault as traditionally defined may have actually gone down, while what counts as sexual assault keeps expanding. There doesn’t seem to be any way of answering this question statistically, though in the chapters that follow we’ll see that what counts as sexual assault is indeed being exponentially expanded, usually behind closed doors."(62)
Volgt het verhaal van de ellende die professor Peter Ludlow meemaakte door een (valse) beschuldiging van een student.
"If Cho was girlishly overinvested in Ludlow’s stature, the older women she consulted seemed similarly disposed: fixated on and repelled by a fantasy of powerful, brutish men. It’s one of the tragicomic elements of the campus situation that the guys onto whom such fantasies are projected are often as hapless as they come."(90)
"The student, voice raised, was arguing over an A-minus final grade. I’d had this student myself; she’d excoriated me by email and on the course evaluations for mistakes she said I’d made in the design of the class. She was someone who thought of herself as disempowered — in fact she was consumed with the idea — yet acted like a bulldozer. If I’d been untenured, I’d have been worried about engaging in the confrontation that was going on down the hall: the reality is that it’s far more likely for a student to derail a professor’s career these days than the other way around. In fact, students can be quite ruthless in trying to bring down the objects of their enmity, including fighting (with increasing success) to fire professors whose views, demeanor, or humor they find not to their liking.
Yet, for the bureaucrats writing our campus codes, only the crudest versions of top-down power are imaginable. Students are putty in the hands of an all-powerful professoriate." [mijn nadruk] (92)
"“Who propositioned whom?” was, of course, a crucial question. Cho can come on to Ludlow, but if he came on to her, it would have been an “unwelcome advance.” If Slavin reports that Cho’s boyfriend was a freshman and they don’t have sex, it paints a certain picture of Cho: an innocent. Things couldn’t have happened the way Ludlow said because of Cho’s innocence. Even if an innocent can still proposition a professor, the more familiar script kicked in: Ludlow was a sexual predator trying to sway Cho from the path of virtue." [mijn nadruk] (101)
"“I find it inherently implausible that Respondent told Complainant to chill and to stop kissing him,” states Slavin [de Title IX-functionaris van de universiteit - GdG].
Is it “inherently implausible” that Ludlow would tell Cho to stop kissing him because . . . that’s not what a man would do? Because a middle-aged man is more likely to come on to a young woman than the other way around? Is this based on men Slavin knows, or just generalities about men? She seems to have firmly ingrained ideas about the ways men and women act; when Cho confirms those ideas, Slavin confirms Cho’s account." [mijn nadruk] (102)
[Kipnis weergave is geweldig. Hoe is het toch mogelijk dat je uitgeleverd kunt zijn aan zo iemand die haar eigen waarden en normen niet eens kent? Dat zo iemand zonder meer een valse beschuldiging gelooft vanuit vooroordelen en dat je je als beschuldigde op geen enkele manier kunt verdedigen binnen de universiteit en alleen met veel geld voor dure advocaten buiten de universiteit? Dat er alleen maar meningen worden uitgesproken terwijl er geen enkele aandacht is voor de feiten? Dat wat een (jonge) vrouw zegt wel waar moet zijn en wat een (oudere) man zegt niet waar kan zijn?]
"In Slavin’s report, Cho is effectively a child; everything happens to her. Cho shares the self-conception: adulthood seems to figure as a legal technicality at most. For Ludlow’s lawyer, if Cho was over the age of consent then she was a consenting adult. In fact, the question of adulthood—how adult are students?—is one of the central issues under renegotiation on campuses at the moment." [mijn nadruk] (110)
"“Survivors must be believed” is the campus mantra. The problem is the unacknowledged slippage between “survivors” and “accusers.”" [mijn nadruk] (111)
"One of the many things I learned from professors who’ve been the subject of Title IX cases is that there are often shadowy players and issues behind the scenes: departmental rivalries, personal grudges, even scheming exes. It’s not unheard of for professors to urge students to press charges against other professors, or otherwise play the process to their advantage. In some cases, an older generation of feminists have proved adept at using vague misconduct allegations to knock off ideological foes, including loathed younger male professors.(...) ... given weak evidentiary standards and credulous investigators, the Title IX process is extraordinarily available to manipulation. It’s often said that academic politics gets so ugly because the stakes are so low, but the stakes here are people’s careers and livelihoods; for students, expulsion and a life derailed." [mijn nadruk] (112-113)
"In case I haven’t made it sufficiently clear, I absolutely believe there are sexual harassers on campus, and bona fide harassers should be fired. Then there’s bona fide sexual hysteria, the fantasy that predators are lurking around every corner. In fact, having been a little ironic about campus dangers turned me into one of these fantasy figures myself." [mijn nadruk] (119)
"Sexual consent can now be retroactively withdrawn (with official sanction) years later, based on changing feelings or residual ambivalence, or new circumstances. Please note that this makes anyone who’s ever had sex a potential rapist."(130)
[Waanzin ... ]
Een en ander handelt over een andere vrouw, Nola Hartley, die jaren eerder een professor-student-relatie had met Ludlow - hij had verder niet met haar te maken en dan mocht zo'n relatie nog in die tijd - en die met het publiek worden van de kwestie Ludlow - Eunice Cho vond dat ze hetzelfde had meegemaakt en hem alsnog aanklaagde.
"Consensual relationships between professors and grad students weren’t against university policy (and still aren’t), as long as the professor isn’t in a supervisory position, and Ludlow had never been Nola Hartley’s professor or advisor. Hartley was twenty-five at the time, obviously well over the age of consent." [mijn nadruk] (132)
"But everything I learned about this relationship — and I learned a lot — also throws into question all easy assumptions about institutional roles alone determining who has more power in romantic entanglements."(134)
"One problem with these retroactive accusations is that memory doesn’t exactly sharpen over time. In fact, most memory research demonstrates that subsequent events reshape and distort our memories, and the more we recall a given memory, the less accurate it becomes. These revisions accumulate, and can come to seem just as “true” as what actually happened.
The license to rewrite consent also requires a lot of historical amnesia about women’s struggles to shed the constricting innocence patriarchy once imposed on us, namely, the sexual double standard. Sure, sexual freedom sometimes means consenting to things we later regret. But who wants a return to nineteenth-century notions of true womanhood, which conferred moral superiority on females by exempting them from such corruptions and temptations, placing them on a pedestal they finally (thankfully) refused. The pedestal was always a lie, and its twenty-first-century resurrection on campus is no less a lie. Sexual honesty, about women as desiring beings, making our own sexual choices (sometimes even terrible ones), can be painful, but no semblance of gender equality is ever going to be possible without it." [mijn nadruk] (136-137)
Bespreking van de kwestie Hartley - Ludlow.
"So how did Patricia Bobb, first-time Title IX investigator, build her case against Ludlow? We saw Joan Slavin deploying tired biases about male and female nature in the first investigation, and renaming them “preponderance of evidence.” With such biases now firmly installed as campus policy (minus any public scrutiny or discussion, needless to say), the case hardly needed to be built: stereotypes about predatory male sexuality and the eternal innocence of women will suffice."(146)
"The question becomes why Bobb would ultimately favor Hartley’s new account of the relationship over Ludlow’s account, which was backed by numerous forms of evidence, both textual and photographic. In Bobb’s handwritten notes, the sections about Ludlow are scattered with comments such as “don’t believe,” “makes no sense,” “wrong,” and “bullshit.” When Ludlow speaks about his feelings, Bobb scrawls “manipulative.”
She doesn’t just disbelieve Ludlow; she ignores key pieces of evidence he provides about the relationship." [mijn nadruk] (148)
"Speaking of power . . . Let’s be honest. It’s a well-known (if, to some, unpalatable) fact that heterosexual women are not infrequently attracted to male power, and for aspiring female intellectuals of a heterosexual bent, this includes male intellectual power. Even feminists (feminist philosophers included) aren’t immune. What use to anyone is a feminism so steeped in self-exoneration that it prefers to imagine women as helpless children rather than acknowledge grown-up sexual realities?" [mijn nadruk] (150)
[Dat is niet alleen een feit, maar ook een groot probleem omdat vrouwen op die manier een rolverdeling in stand houden die niet deugt resp. mannen bevestigen in gedrag waar we vanaf moeten. Dat postmoderne '(if, to some, unpalatable)' is weer zo zwak. Zeg gewoon dat het verkeerd gedrag is, want dat is het.]
"Falling into line, Patricia Bobb would ultimately conclude, splitting hairs with the impunity of a papal inquisitor, that Ludlow hadn’t forced Hartley into a relationship, but — echoing Lockwood — he did manipulate her into having one. Of course, to come to this finding requires Bobb to expunge all female intelligence, agency, autonomy, and desire from her calculations. This is supposed to be in women’s interests?" [mijn nadruk] (173)
"Hartley seems like one of those people who leave a lot of drama in her wake. Bobb knew about this previous Title IX charge, as did Ludlow — in fact, Ludlow says Bobb asked him if it had worried him about Hartley. Maybe it should have. To date, she’s filed six Title IX complaints — or six that I know of. The four to come I’ll take up in the next chapter. Two of them were against me, which probably colors my thinking about serial charge-bringers. (Yes, Hartley would go on to be my accuser too, after she was Ludlow’s.)" [mijn nadruk] (175)
"Serial charge-bringing is a dangerous proclivity for others in the immediate vicinity. Based on Hartley’s Title IX complaints and Bobb’s findings, the university instituted dismissal proceedings against Ludlow, even though the relationship hadn’t been against any code, even though Bobb hadn’t found against Ludlow on the nonconsensual sex allegation, and even though Hartley had a history as a complaint filer."(176)
Kipnis zelf wordt beschuldigd na publicatie van een artikel in een tijdschrift.
"I couldn’t find anything explaining how you could get brought up on Title IX complaints for writing an essay."(179)
"The fact is, and as my case revealed, no one knows what Title IX demands of universities. University presidents don’t know, Title IX officers themselves don’t know. Title IX officers I’ve spoken to say (not for attribution) that the Dear Colleague letters are incoherent and that everyone’s left trying to figure out how to comply with insufficient and wildly contradictory directives. This means, in effect, that anyone on campus is empowered to decide on and radically expand the Title IX purview, including designating ideological opponents as creators of hostile environments."(197)
"Let me just say that nearly every academic I know — this includes feminists, progressives, minorities, and those who identify as gay or queer — now lives in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster."(198)
"Among other things, I learned that professors, even at major research universities, now routinely avoid discussing subjects in class that might raise hackles."(198)
[Ja, dat krijg je in een dictatuur: zelfcensuur ... ]
"Seventy-two days after the investigation commenced, the Chronicle ran the piece I’d written about the process, “My Title IX Inquisition,” even though I was still waiting to hear the outcome of the case. There was an immediate commotion on social media, and in the real media, too. No one had thought that in America you could get put on trial for writing an essay, especially a secret trial where they refused to put the charges against you in writing. Around 6:00 p.m. the same day, twelve hours after the piece went online, I got an email from the lead investigator telling me that I had been cleared of all the charges." [mijn nadruk] (207)
"Were they more inclined to work so vigorously to clear me because they knew I planned to write about the investigation? Or was it because they, too, thought the charges were bogus? Either way, it seems clear that the case had to come out in my favor. If I’d been found culpable under Title IX for writing an essay and gone public about it, I suspect there would have been a national outcry, and the Title IX enterprise would have faced the public scrutiny it should be getting and isn’t."(212)
Allerlei andere voorbeelden van onterechte aanklachten, vaak omgeven met anonimiteit en een totaal gebrek aan transparantie, totale onduidelijkheid over de rechten van de beschuldigden, en zo verder.
"For some of our leading public feminists, whether male students accused of sexual misconduct get fair hearings or not is beside the point. As activist and commentator Zerlina Maxwell put it in a 2014 Washington Post commentary: “We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.” Maxwell was discussing the notoriously misreported Rolling Stone article about a sexual assault at the University of Virginia that turned out to be based on a false claim. Even after the story was exposed as false, Maxwell was still arguing that all claims have to be believed. On Maxwell’s website there’s a photo of her with Barack Obama, aloft on Air Force One. This isn’t a random extremist; this woman had the ear of a president." [mijn nadruk] (232)
"Greer thinks that as many as a quarter of men charged with criminal rape might be innocent (and points out that such wrongful convictions fall disproportionately on young black men)."(235)
"Those who attempt to disrupt the official narrative, or disprove the unprovable, can find their own lives shredded in the process. When I first published my own tentative salvos at the Title IX machinery, I hadn’t yet heard the story of another professor named David Barnett, who’d once been on the faculty at the University of Colorado. Would I have gone forward with my essay anyway, had I known what had happened to him? Probably, though he’s a walking illustration of the perils of sticking your neck out." [mijn nadruk] (236)
"Sure, Barnett had embarrassed the university by exposing how flawed their investigation procedures were, but shouldn’t the investigators have been on the hook rather than he? Colorado has a whistleblower statute; Barnett brought suit under it. The university finally coughed up a $160,000 settlement in exchange for his resignation. (They also paid his attorney fees and forgave an $80,000 home loan.) The upshot is that Barnett is no longer a philosophy professor.
Among the many omissions in ODR’s report were multiple corroborated statements that Ann herself had been sexually aggressive toward the male roommates throughout the evening. This wouldn’t suffice as the official story; obviously it had to be Ben who was the aggressor. Nevertheless, Ben’s roommate, Cary, brought his own sexual misconduct charges against Ann, for getting into his bed while he was asleep and fondling him. This was a problem for the official story. Solution? Ann was found guilty of sexual misconduct—after getting an $825,000 payout.
In other words, Barnett’s conclusions were upheld by the university; nonetheless, he was out of a job. Ann’s penalty for sexual misconduct? Was her association with the university terminated, along with Ben’s and Barnett’s? No, she got academic probation (a slap on the wrist), a fact much commented upon in Barnett’s former department. Plus that $825,000."(240)
"One reason to get rid of confidentiality in campus adjudications would be to cut down on abuses of the process. Another is to initiate an open discussion about what counts as injury and consent. The gender assumptions embedded in these verdicts should also be open to public scrutiny. As it stands, the procedural haphazardness in such cases is beyond shocking — precisely because investigators are accountable to no one." [mijn nadruk] (247)
"Still, you can’t help noticing, if you pay any attention to campus sexual culture, that there’s a pretty strictly enforced cone of silence around the drinking problem as it pertains to women and the sexual assault issue. The main enforcement mechanism is that if you mention the connection, you’ll immediately be accused of “blaming the victim” — or “slut shaming.”"(258)
"Still, if you’re going to talk about the drinking in conjunction with the nonconsensual sex, tread carefully. One researcher studying campus assault calls it “the ‘third rail’ of the discourse, something no one wants to go near.” Anyone who suggests that women should drink less to avoid sexual assault will be “disemboweled upon arrival into the gladiator arena of public discourse,” as Hepola puts it."(263)
[Dat laatste is ook wel terecht. Waarom op dit punt van eindeloos te veel drinken alleen vrouwen de les lezen? Hetzelfde geldt immers ook voor mannen. Al dat gezuip is een algemeen probleem waar iets aan gedaan zou moeten worden. ]
"Alcohol is an intensifier; it intensifies acting out. Increased male aggressiveness when drinking is inarguably a factor in what’s known as rape culture. Men drink and act out stereotypical versions of masculinity, especially men in groups — namely, frat guys and athletes." [mijn nadruk] (269)
"Drinking may be a way of shedding inhibitions, but if we can’t also talk about the ways that drinking increases tendencies for stereotypical female behavior, too — namely, female passivity — then we’re being gender hypocrites." [mijn nadruk] (270)
"One of the dirty little secrets of hookup culture is that a significant proportion of college women don’t know how to say no to sex, which is painful to anyone who thinks that, by this point in the long slog toward female independence, no would be the easiest word in the language. Instead you hear, in case after case, about women drinking so much they’re incapable of saying yes or no. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask if one of the benefits of blackout drinking is not having to decide." [mijn nadruk] (273)
"Some women don’t say no because they fear they’ll be considered teases; or they bemoan that they’re “pleasers.” Some were simply too inexperienced to know what was happening. (...) The gist of the women’s comments was that this is a pretty universal experience. The gist of the men’s comments was that they usually have no idea what a woman does or doesn’t want. Women don’t tell them, and more than a few guys complain that if they stop and ask for consent, women get pissed off, because it kills the mood. Most don’t see why all the responsibility should be on them."(277)
"A provisional answer is that there aren’t sufficient social prohibitions to rely on these days: women actually have to know what they want to do, especially since there are endless pressures to say yes. Not just from guys, the pressure to be sexy or “hot” is a huge social factor — don’t get me started on commodified sexuality. Those pressures (and self-pressures) loom just as large as guys pressuring women for sex. In the absence of physical force — and it is mostly absent in “nonconsensual sex” situations on campus, according to all the data (only 5 percent of assault cases involve physical coercion, according to a 2009 study) — it’s not simply men who are responsible for the incomplete progress toward female sexual agency." [mijn nadruk] (278)
"There are clearly sexual assaults on campus. There are also hyperbolic accusations, failures of self-accountability, and a crazy expansionism about what constitutes rape and assault. Most campus rape activists, including Heidi Lockwood, now argue that rape doesn’t require penetration—Lockwood calls the obsession with penetration as the definition of rape “old-fashioned and bizarre.” Focusing on the physical specifics of a sexual assault is “archaic” and disrespectful to victims, she says. Even shifting the focus from the act to whether it was consented to is problematic for her, since it puts victims in the position of proving they aren’t lying.
I think she’s saying that what counts as rape is whatever the victims feel counts as rape, which is increasingly the approach the officials adjudicating the cases seem to be taking too." [mijn nadruk] (281)
"Men coercing sex from women may be standard procedure on the normal heterosexuality spectrum, but so is the tendency for women to overvalue men and male attention in ways that make us stupid and self-abnegating. And I don’t believe for a second that the supposed sexual equity of campus hookup culture has changed anything on this front, despite the window dressing of mutuality."(282)
[Ben het zeer met haar eens.]
"Let’s face it: sex, even under optimal circumstances, requires a certain amount of psychological resiliency. Being naked, exposed, and physically handled by another human can be destabilizing and not always pleasant, especially when the other human is drunk, clumsy, and/or a complete stranger. If you’re a girl, for the most part no one teaches you what to do or how to extricate yourself when things don’t feel good. (Sometimes girlfriends are a resource here, sometimes not.) For the more emotionally unprotected among us, drunken random hookups are a formula for psychological discomfort and interpersonal disaster.
Women want to have sexual adventures and make mistakes, but there’s a growing tendency, at the moment, to offload the responsibility, to make other people pay for those mistakes — namely, guys. Women don’t drink; men get them drunk. Women don’t have sex; sex is done to them.
This isn’t feminism, it’s a return to the most traditional conceptions of female sexuality. What dimwitted sort of feminism wants to shelter women from the richness of their own mistakes? Their own ambivalences? And speaking now as a teacher, how do such protections prepare students to deal with the sexual messiness and boorish badlands of life post-graduation, when code-wielding bureaucrats aren’t on standby?
Some women absolutely do hold themselves equally responsible in such situations, and I suspect these students fare better than those who fall into the enfeebled victim role." [mijn nadruk] (284-285)
[Het is ook vaak een statuskwestie: vrouwen zoeken de 'echte mannen' op, bijvoorbeeld de brallers van de studentencorpora of atleten. Dat maakt hen blijkbaar meer tot vrouw. Er is toch maar weinig veranderd aan de befaamde rolverdelingen en de waarderingen van mannen en vrouwen. Schokkend.]
"...athletes often still feel like celebs and expect sexual privileges to be doled out accordingly"(287)
[Dat zegt ook heel veel over de normatieve waardering van sport bijvoorbeeld in ver3elijking met iemand die goed is in computertechnologie.]
"Here’s an interesting fact about current educational efforts to minimize campus assaults: they’ve been useless. According to all the research, including a recent meta-analysis of sixty-nine different empirical studies, there’s no demonstrable relation between prevention efforts and reducing assault levels." [mijn nadruk] (289)
"One notices uneasily that the resulting campus policies manage to precisely replicate the supposedly passé social idea that men have agency and women are people to whom things just happen. Yet training women to have more agency is somehow taboo." [mijn nadruk] (291)
"As a teacher with some experience of college men, I’d say that a large problem with focusing social change efforts on men is that the men most likely to be assholes to women are precisely the ones most likely to resist being enlightened."(292)
"Reeducate these guys? A noble effort, but good luck. In my experience, some students are uneducable—not because they’re not intelligent, but because they’re rigid character types, steeped in self-justification."(295)
"How can it be that fifty or so years after second-wave feminism became a dominant feature in the cultural landscape, decades after the term assertiveness training became common currency, a grad student, a feminist, can’t bring herself to say to a man, “Get your hand off my knee”?"(297)
[Precies. ]
"Freezing in panic situations turns out to be a common female trait — compare the respective behaviors of my male roommate, not an especially huge guy, and me, frozen in the bed. So, it’s not as though I don’t understand “Surrounded’s” response to those hands on her legs."(299)
"Politicizing rape and reforming the criminal justice procedures for handling it has been among the great successes of American feminism, though one propelled (necessarily, in the early years) by significant blind spots and exclusions. One blind spot is female agency.
Mainstream American feminism has never been exactly long on psychological complexity. The preoccupation has been in getting society to change, and getting men to change, rather than prolonged bouts of self-reflection. Putting male sexuality on trial isn’t a bad thing, but we don’t want to turn ourselves into sexual hypocrites along the way by leaving ourselves out of the story, do we?" [mijn nadruk] (303)
Ludlows ontslagzaak door de universiteit waarbij Kipnis aanwezig was.
"“Are the accusers always holy now?” demands the accused witch John Proctor (soon to be executed) in Miller’s The Crucible. On campus, the answer is yes."(331)
"Yes, Ludlow was guilty — though not of what the university charged him with. His crime was thinking that women over the age of consent have sexual agency, which has lately become a heretical view, despite once being a crucial feminist position. Of course the community had to expel him. That’s what you do with heretics."(332)